Our ref: FOI-2569-2021 Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 11 March 2021 asking for information about Penalty Charge Notices (PCNs). Your request has been considered under the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and our information access policy. You asked: ‘How many people since inception of the Auto Pay Service received penalty notices after registering for a ‘base account’.’ Unfortunately we do not hold the information you require in a way which allows us to answer your request. The recorded reason for the issuing of a PCN is that no payment is associated with the vehicle. To answer your question we would therefore need to manually check all of the PCNs to see if they were issued to people who only had a base account and no Auto Pay. This would take an excessive amount of time, and would exceed the ‘appropriate limit’ of £450 set by the Freedom of Information (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004. Under section 12 of the FOI Act, we are not obliged to comply with requests if we estimate that the cost of determining whether we hold the information, locating and retrieving it and extracting it from other information would exceed the appropriate limit. In this instance, we estimate that the time required to answer your request would exceed 18 hours which, at £25 per hour (the rate stipulated by the Regulations), exceeds the ‘appropriate limit’. If you are considering submitting a further FOI request please think carefully about whether the request is essential at this current time, as answering FOI requests will require the use of limited resources and the attention of staff who could be supporting other essential activity. Where requests are made, please note that our response time may be impacted by the current situation. If you are not satisfied with this response please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal. Yours sincerely Graham Hurt FOI Case Officer FOI Case Management Team General Counsel Transport for London